Injury as a Superpower

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It doesn’t matter how much of a fitness beast you are, there will be points in your life when you enter the winter. Sometimes it’s just a little cold front, like getting a bad flu for a week or having house guests who eat into your training time. Sometimes it’s a massive, life-changing, Game of Thrones, ice wall winter. No matter the intensity, you have to know how to deal with winter.

Right now I’m feeling like Jon Snow. While I am healing, the process is neither speedy nor linear. My movement, and my life, have gone from being adventuresome and active to quiet and repetitive. This is the dark season of injury. Fortunately I’ve been here before and I know the territory.

I am not a natural athlete. My life has been a long series of seasonal changes as I train, thrive, strive, over-reach or get injured, collapse, and rebuild. It is only recently in my research on Symptomatic Joint Hypermobility and EDS that I found out how typical this is for us bendy noodle types.

At this point, knowing how to be injured is one of my greatest superpowers. I have so many friends and clients in the world of physical movement who reach their first serious injury well into their careers and are completely flummoxed by this massive betrayal by their heretofore exquisitely expressive bodies. They struggle with knowing how to move in any way other than as an elite athlete, and so they struggle to heal.

If this is you, feeling a cold front roll in, you are not alone. Here are a few things that I have learned over the years that have helped me to get through my multiple training winters…

• Training winters aren’t a sign of failure—they are a reality of living in this mortal meat suit. Managing winter is part of training. There is nothing to be ashamed of. Fuck shame.

• Healing demands a different skill set from performance training. We must be responsive, gentle, and attentive. We are called to a radical change of mindset.

• Relationships are key to getting through these hard times—our relationship with community and our relationship with our own bodies. Cultivate those relationships.

• Your body will change when you have to slow down. Your body composition will change. No big deal. While long periods of detraining reduces muscle size and strength, regaining those muscles is much easier than gaining them in the first place. Your identity as a mover is not lost if you detrain for a while.

• Healing can’t be forced, we can only cultivate the optimal conditions for it to unfold. Then we just have to let our bodies do what they do. Trying to speed things along will only elevate the risk of setting us back. It took me forever to get the hang of this one!

• No matter what caused this winter to appear in front of us, our bodies need us to provide reassurance. This feels very different from the hard core training we know well. However, if you slow down enough to learn it you will come back with powerful new tools to improve training at any level.

• We are not done. If we are alive, the possibility for movement remains. It may be different, but different doesn’t mean bad, it just means different.

Obviously this is just a fly-over view of the complexities, emotional and physical, that come from confronting the cold season. To sum it up, I have learned that the winter can be full of gifts as long as we choose to engage. If we can suspend our fear and judgement, stay present through the subtleties of healing, and stay connected to ourselves and our loved ones, we can come out so much stronger and healthier than we went in.

I am currently reading Wintering by Katherine May, a timely choice recommended by a good friend. May writes, “We are… in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear; a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish, and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”

Thoughts? Does this resonate? Think I’m full of it? I’d love to hear from you!

Happy Bendings and Happy Holidays,

Kristina